‘The Watcher’ House’s Real-Life Neighbors Sick of Crowds of Sightseers
“The Watcher,” Ryan Murphy’s latest true-crime-inspired Netflix hit, is inspiring fans to seek out the real house in Westfield, New Jersey, where the Broaddus family were sent threatening letters in 2014 by someone who claimed to be watching them and the house.
On Saturday, resident Trish Dulinkski told NJ.com, “We are all concerned for the family living there now and their neighbors. I cannot imagine how long it will be before people lose interest so the neighborhood can go back to normal, nor can I imagine how much mail the poor current owners will receive from crackpots all over the world.”
Sabina Schutt, another resident who lives around the corner from the infamous house told NJ.com she doesn’t appreciate the traffic, or the morbid sightseers. “I think the show doesn’t do wonders for placing our little, but amazing town in a negative light,” she said.
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The series topped Murphy’s other Netflix series, “Dahmer,” for the streamer’s most-watched series this week, with 125 million hours viewed and was in the Top 10 in 90 countries, according to Netflix.
Lookie-loos from around the globe are dying to see the six-bedroom Dutch colonial at 657 Boulevard, including United Kingdom resident, Louise Evans, who was visiting friends in nearby New Providence, told NJ.com, “It’s just a really interesting story,” she said. “I lived in New Providence when this was all happening, so now that I’m visiting friends here, I thought, ‘let’s see the house.’”
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Police have stationed officers outside the home and put up yellow tape and a barricade in the driveway to prevent trespassers, NJ.com reports.
Although the show used the home’s real street address, it did not film in Westfield, but at a house in Rye, New York.
The series, which renamed the family the “Brannocks,” stars Naomi Watts and Bobby Cannavale as the terrorized homeowners. Murphy also brings in a fictionalized version of a different infamous case from Westfield, the 1971 John List murders, in which the accountant killed his entire family and was only caught nearly 18 years later. That home has since been demolished.
